


Smalltown Washington

by Crimson_Voltaire



Series: This Twisted Space [2]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - FBI, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood, Blood and Gore, F/M, FBI Agent Newt, M/M, Murder, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Serial Killers, Stalking, Vampire Original Percival Graves, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 04:40:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12674628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crimson_Voltaire/pseuds/Crimson_Voltaire
Summary: People are dying in Washington State. Newt goes up to find out why. He might end up regretting this assignment.Now, don't get him wrong, Newt's been around this block more than once, and he's helped bring down some pretty big baddies. But when the players in this particular game aren't even supposed to be real, well now, that's a whole 'nother thing entirely.





	Smalltown Washington

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! This is the much awaited story that goes along with and precedes I Died in the Dark (I Died in Your Arms). Life is busy, and I have no idea where the heck I'm going with this thing, but I hope you'll enjoy the ride. 
> 
> Warnings for the dark things that come with a serial killer and vampires. And as always, unbeta'd. Thanks to Wanderingnork on Tumblr for making me post it, though.

**Port Angeles, Washington - Present Day**

"He's dead, Jim," the woman says, leaning against an empty mortuary slab and staring at Newt with something akin to curiosity. She unwraps her hotdog and takes a rather large bite, unbothered by the corpse lying on a slab a few feet away from her. Mustard drips from the bun, falling to splatter on her white lab coat. 

"Shoot," she says, wiping at it frantically.  Newt stands and watches her, halfway to feeling incredulous. 

"Yes, I know he's dead," Newt snaps, "And my name is Newt, not Jim."

The woman - mortician, coroner, whatever, glances up from mopping her coat, one fine eyebrow raised, "Newt? Your parents named you after a lizard? And it was a reference to, you know, Star Trek."

"It's short for Newton, and I've never seen Star Trek," Newt sniffs, and then regrets it because have you ever been in close to a body that's been unoccupied for a few days? The woman snorts, "I don't know if that's much better than Newt. Anyways, Tina Goldstein, pleased to meetcha, Newt."

She sticks out the hand currently not holding the hotdog. Newt glances down at it and wrinkles his nose. Tina's face pinches tight, offence bleeding into her features,  
"What? I washed it!"  


Newt clears his throat and makes a little gesture with his hand. Tina checks her own and realizes there's mustard on her skin. 

"Oh, thanks. Sorry about that," she laughs, wiping it off on the hot dog wrapper before taking another bite from her lunch. Newt sighs and shakes his head. 

“It’s fine,” he says, more to himself than to her. Turning back to the body splayed out on the slab, Newt leans in close, passing a critical eye over pale, waxy skin and unnatural stillness. The man is a few days gone, obviously, considering the extent of the rigor mortis, but Newt notices that his extremities aren’t deep purple and black, the way they should be. You see, when a heart stops beating, gravity pulls the blood into the lowest points of the body. With this guy on his back, his feet, hands and sides should all be purple black. But they aren't.   
  
“He isn’t showing signs of livor mortis,” Newt finally observes aloud, “Any theories?”   
Tina makes a noise of agreement, swallowing down her mouthful of food and gesturing with what’s left to the body.   
  
“Yeah. He’s completely drained of blood. ‘S probably got somethin’ to do with that,” she says, pointing to the perfect indentation of a set of teeth in the man’s throat. They’re deep, enough to break the skin with two distinct gashes where the canine teeth should be. Newt’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.    
  
“They drained an entire body through that?” 

Tina hums, nodding, “Mhmm, did it well, too.”

“Did you run dental records?” Newt asks. Some of that earlier incredulousness returns, churning in his gut.   
  
“Yup, sent them with the first victim. Came back with zilch. Your guy ain’t in the system, or at least in Washington’s. We’ll have to get more prints if you want to go national.” 

Newt nods, “Let’s. I’m not sure how fruitful they’ll be, but I have to try. You said they were effective at draining of all the blood?”

“‘Uh-huh. S why there’s no discolouration. Our poor unfortunate soul doesn’t have enough blood left for it to settle. Those wounds are deep, they hit both the jugular and the carotid.”

Tina’s crassness should be a surprise. To anyone outside of their chosen professions, her complete lack of regard for a body in front of her would probably be deeply upsetting. But as it is, coroners are generally pretty weird. FBI agents too. Newt’s brows shoot towards his hairline. Something like curiosity niggles at the space beneath his lungs, an ever present itch to know  _ why _ . Tina continues, still leaning back against her mortuary slab,  
  
“Do you know how  _ hard _ you have to bite someone to hit their carotid artery?”   
  
He feels like this might be a rhetorical question, one of those odd social phenomena that Newt learned about but never really grasped for himself. He squints at her, assessing the open play of emotions across her face, before giving Tina a one armed shrug.    
  
“The average adult can bite with something like one hundred and eight pounds of force per square inch.”   
  
That startles a laugh from her. Tina’s eyes, so dark and warm, sparkle with amusement for a moment. Newt finds himself thinking she is very pretty when she laughs. Tina gives him a shake of her head, whistling slowly.    
  
“I wasn’t expecting that,” she chuckles, “But the answer was  _ hard _ . Maybe not a hundred and eight pounds hard, but pretty damn hard. And you’d have to keep the person still to get a bite that clean.”    
  
Tina pushes off the slab, crossing the short distance to the body, and lifts one of the man’s arms. There’s discolouration in that forearm, the one facing away from Newt. On the inside of the wrist, stark against paper white skin and blue veins, are four finger marks which settled into flesh before the blood supply faded.    
  
“Whoever this is is strong enough to leave serious bruising, and strong enough, or _smart_ enough, to restrain a fully grown man and bite him hard enough to do that kind of damage.”   
  
Tina releases the man’s arm and points to the wound in his neck again, “With both major blood vessels severed, the poor sap bled out in minutes.”  
  
Newt hums and frowns, sweeping over the body again, looking for anything else out of place. He's trying to formulate a picture in his mind, take the bits Tina is giving him, and what he’s gleaned himself, and put them into some logical order. It isn’t adding up. 

“You don’t have to lose every drop of blood to die. How’d they manage to drain him if he bled out so quickly?”  
  
When the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing. Short of hanging the guy upside down by his ankles, Newt doesn't really understand how the killer could have drained so much of it. Tina's eyes light up in a way  should be a sign of insanity, or at least sociopathy. But, as we have already established, coroners are weird. She turns in a whirl of white lab coat, stuffing the rest of her hotdog in her mouth and shuffling to a nearby computer. A few keystrokes later, and images are popping up on a screen on the wall. There’s X-rays and pictures of the victim’s neck wound. In the background, Tina has similar files from the other three victims running. Newt makes a mental note to ask about those later.   
  
“See that?” Tina asks, gesticulating to the significant bruising around the bite mark, “What does that look like to you?”  
  
It looks like, well, a hickey. As with all the rest of the bruising, it’s perimortem. Those bruises are  _ dark _ , which tells him there was enough time for the injury to form, but no time for it to heal. Newt cocks his head and folds his arms over his chest, worrying the cardboard of the file folder between his thumb and index finger.   
  
“It looks… Like someone was sucking on the wound,” Newt murmurs. His belly gives an uncomfortable twist at the idea. Tina grins and nods, “Ding, ding, we have a winner.”   
She scrolls through the series of x-rays, stopping at the ones which show the man’s chest and ribcage. The image is cloudy, as radiographs are prone to be. Newt edges closer, pouring over the image. Something just isn’t right, and Tina knows he knows. She comes to stand beside him, reaching up to tap at one of the areas Newt had been looking over.    
  
“Now, look at his ribs. They’re fractured. Look at the pattern to those fractures. When do you get that kind of fractal patterning?”   


Her voice is breathy and pitched up in excitement, like she’s enjoying the fact that he’s humoring her and following along. Newt studies the broken ribs for a moment longer before a synapse fires in his brain. His stomach gives another uncomfortable lurch, moving like a bumper car just hit from behind.   
  
“You get that when someone’s performed CPR.”  
  
“Exactly!” Tina cries. Then, she goes quiet, as if the implication has just dawned on her. Deep brown eyes find Newt’s green-grey ones, swimming with emotions Newt doesn’t care to identify. His own mind is swirling with thoughts, brain cells busy creating links between the snippets of information he has.  
  
“So,” Newt says slowly, glancing down at the corpse again, eyes tracing the thick lines of the autopsy sutures, “We have an unidentified victim-”   
  
“More than one,” Tina interjects. Another few strokes of the keyboard has two more sets of x-rays and images popping up beside the original, each eerily similar in appearance to the first. Newt huffs before continuing.    
  
“More than one victim, found deep in the woods, completely drained of blood through a bite. They all have a mark like a hickey around said wound, and fractured ribs which appear to be consistent with CPR…” He pauses, considering the ridiculousness of what he’s about to say.    
“Whoever this is, they were doing compressions… To keep the blood flowing… And the bite?”  
  
The coroner shrugs, “Your guess is as good as mine, I mean, if you look past the obvious.”   
Newt fixes her with a sharp glare, “Obvious?”   


Her own expression is as equally serious, pale face set firm, “You’re looking for a vampire, dude. Or, at least someone who wants you to think they are.”

* * *

* * *

**Port Angeles, Washington - Present Day**

The sun sits low on the horizon. Its rays, orange and red and yellow-gold, just brush the very tops of skyscrapers and towers. The city below is sinking into darkness, blues and violets that grow deeper with each passing second. The city dwellers don’t seem to mind, lights flickering on to combat the darkness, coats pulled on to ward off the chill, but nothing else really changes. The streets remain buzzing with activity, or, as much as they can in a place of just under twenty thousand. 

Tourists stroll up and down the quaint streets leading down to the boardwalk, trees strung with fairy lights, laughing and talking and drinking. Having a good time. He watches them from the patio of a cute little Italian place, enjoying the late August breeze and the way his beer slides down his throat. It doesn’t satisfy the itch or satiate the hunger roiling in his belly any more than his linguini did, but it’s something. Besides, they’re just props, they aren’t meant to sate him anyways. 

Sighing, he sets down his half-empty glass, reclining in his chair and settles his arms over his chest. Around him, three dozen hearts pulse, The soft whisper of blood in their veins sings to him, a croon only he can hear. It’s gentle, like a lover murmuring a promise in his ear. He smiles, a quick flicker of his lips and tilts his head into the sound. It should be torture. Centuries ago, it was. But he’s built control, learned to take the animal and trap it in a steel box, learned to never let it out until he’s sure it’s safe. He’s escaped enough burnings to know what fire tastes like in your mouth, what it feels like under your skin, he doesn’t need anyone catching on anytime soon. So, he sits and he waits on this little patio, at this little restaurant, in this not so little city. Waits as hearts beat and people go by, looking for one, specific individual. He doesn’t know who they are, but he’ll know when he finds them. 

Some time and another beer later, that person wanders by. She’s beautiful, meandering down the street with a few shopping bags, skinny jeans pulled tight over wide hips, her tightly coiled black hair like a halo around her stunning face. She’s got gold in her nose that glints in the fairy lights, catching his eye. And she smells like sweet summer wine, the song in her blood like that of a siren, calling him to ruin on the rocks. He straightens, gesturing to garner the waiter’s attention. She’ll be gone by the time he’s paid, sure, but it’s no matter. Her scent leaves a trail, and he will follow. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave your thoughts! Feedback helps me write better!


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